Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [40]
In a book written many years later, Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement by William Courtney Watts, Ford is described this way: six feet tall—much taller than the average then—and very powerfully built, “a perfect Hercules” in his youth but by his fifties grown corpulent. He was handsome, with graying brown hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. He had a florid face, a short and thick nose, a “remarkably long” upper lip, a “full and sensuous” mouth, a deep and sonorous voice. “On the whole,” someone said, “when in repose, he gives one the idea of a good-natured, rather than a surly, bull-dog; but, if aroused, I should say he would be a lion tamer.”
His skill at lion taming came out in his other occupations: he ran the county’s regulators, and he presided over the local court of Judge Lynch. These were heavy jobs. That region along the Ohio was extraordinarily dangerous. There were many bands of pirates working the river; one of their hideouts, Cave-in-Rock, about ten miles downriver from the ferry, was notorious all over the frontier, the successor in evil to the Crow’s Nest. There were also gangs of highwaymen who could be counted on to challenge every lone traveler on the roads all around the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Ford earned a reputation as an implacable foe of these outlaws. He was fiercely protective of the roads on either side of the ferry. Any bandit preying on his ferry passengers who came before his lynching court was certain to be put to death. He often went out patrolling with the regulators himself. Newspaper accounts of robberies along the ferry road routinely concluded, “Jim Ford found the robbers and ran them out of the county.”
And yet, for all his determined crusading, the region never got any safer. By the late 1820s, there was one remarkably persistent outlaw band that seemed to be responsible for most of the robberies, deaths, and disappearances on the Illinois side of the river. They became known, doubtless to Ford’s intense displeasure, as the Ford’s Ferry Gang. They were so successful that people began to say darkly that some other factor had to be involved: surely they must be in league with some apparently upstanding local citizen who was providing them with both information and cover. Suspicion fell particularly on a man named Billy Potts. Potts owned an inn in Illinois just up the road from Ford’s Ferry. The rumor was that he was a spotter for the Ford’s Ferry Gang, alerting them to which of his guests had money, and which didn’t need to be bothered with. It was also said that the big field behind Potts’s inn was where the unlucky travelers ended up buried. The field was excavated, over Potts’s outraged protests. The bodies were indeed there. Potts was immediately arrested and turned over to the government court for trial.
But nobody believed that this was the end of it. Potts was regarded around the area as a simpleton—or at least not somebody clever enough to have come up with this spotting system on his own. That was when people started wondering about Ford himself.
It made perfect sense. If he really was the ringleader of the Ford’s Ferry Gang, it would explain why the gang was never caught. As the presiding judge at the lynching court, he could guarantee that any member of his gang detained by the regulators or the committees could be found innocent and set free. Then, too, as the head of the regulators, he could ensure that all the rival gangs could be killed or driven away, leaving his own gang with a monopoly.
The talk slowly poisoned Ford’s reputation. Nobody had any proof—but nobody could quite dismiss the idea out of hand, either. (In Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, even Ford’s daughter isn’t entirely certain of his innocence.) Of particular concern were the men he